My Dream Cat was the devil

It had been weeks.

Weeks of thinking about getting a new cat.

Weeks of scrolling through the Geelong Animal Welfare Society’s (GAWS) website looking at all their precious kittens and cats.

Weeks of uhm-ing and ahh-ing, flipping and flopping, should-I-get-a-cat-ing or shouldn’t-I-get-a-cat-ing?

That is, until I saw her in all her green-eyed, striped-tail, tabby cat glory.

I only had two prerequisites:

1. Be a female

2. Look exactly the opposite of my childhood cat Molly (white with caramel stripes) who lived to the ripe age of 17 (bless that cat, may she Rest Kitty Heaven Peace)

And I had found it, at 8pm on a cold October Thursday evening, encapsulated in a little information box on the GAWS website.

Tick, tick, double tick. This sweet little girl was gonna be my sidekick.

She was STUNNING and I simply had to have her or I would die.

The next day, I jumped in my trusty little silver Subaru Impreza and headed fifteen minutes down the highway to GAWS.

I had never been before and though I was excited to see if this cat—aka My Dream Cat—was still there, my heart broke for all the sweet little souls I couldn’t ever take home.

Some watched intently as I passed them by, others mewed half-heartedly, knowing that it wasn’t me that would be their saviour.

Finally, I found My Dream Cat.

Phew, she looked just like her dating profile picture (unlike some of those dudes on Tinder, am I right?)

Immediately, my brow furrowed. Why was there towels and blankets hanging from either side of her cage. They blocked her off from the cats either side of her, how peculiar... No other cat’s cage was covered in so dramatically.

A young couple appeared from within My Dream Cat’s cage.

“Be careful, she bites.”

Oh no. My Dream Cat was the devil…

I sighed. No harm in going in and seeing her for myself though, right? Right?

Cautiously, I edged through the metal door and into the cage.

And you know what she did?

That sweet girl came right up to me and gave me an aggressive but affection-fueled head boop. She weaved up and down along my outstretched palm, her purrs vibrating like a stationary motorbike engine.

This was it. Our connection was instant. This flutter in my chest and tingles in my fingers—this what insta-love felt like.

Screw all those trashy romance novels I’d been reading for years. Ha! All those authors have been lying to us, ladies. Insta-love doesn’t happen with a tall, dark and handsome man at a coffee shop like they lead us to believe. Oh no, it happens when you found your green-eyed dream cat at the pound!

Later I learned that the blankets hanging in her cage were to block her view of the other cats, which seemed legit and I figured it couldn’t be that bad, could it?

My Dream Cat’s dislike of other cats just meant the temptation to, once again, visit the pound on a whim one random Friday afternoon and adopt another cat was impossible. No more cats for me, which is for the best, I mused to myself.

Well, well, well. I learned one morning at 3am when she saw the neighbour’s cat through the window that My Dream Cat not only absolutely loathed those other cats, she made the god awful, stomach curdling noise to prove it!

Gah, such melodramatics.

The thing is though, for all of her funny little “quirks”—the loudest snoring in the world, a propensity for gutting birds in my closet and stealing the pizza crusts off my plate—I wouldn’t change a bloody thing about My Dream Cat...

Except her name. She came to me as Cherry and my mum wouldn’t shut up about her having the name of a stripper so now she’s Hazel (but that’s just semantics, the sentiment remains.)

It’s odd, isn’t it? How this cat who looked like a challenge, who nipped at other strangers and has the most dramatically sassy resting bitch face I’ve ever seen, has turned into the most affectionate, head booping, I’ll-never-leave-your-side companion a gal could ask for.

Hazel, My Dream Cat. My best friend in the entire world… my sidekick, my soulmate.

So, next time you head to the pound and see a cat that looks like it could be trouble, know that you are 100% right, it will be trouble. Like sitting in the bathtub chasing her tail kinda trouble. But it’ll be the best goddamn trouble you’ve ever wriggled your way into.